Tennis and Pepper Spray: A Match Made In Heaven

By Spencer Hall
I’ve been pepper sprayed, albeit indirectly. It happened at a bar. Two men in clown masked rushed in, sprayed a server full in the face, and then rushed out the back door into the night. Inhaling the stuff is a unique and painful experience: it feels like you just inhaled a sackful of carpentry nails, and it doesn’t go away for hours. The worst thing I can say about it is that beer doesn’t help, and if beer can’t help something it must be really, really bad.
Let’s be frank here, though: if you are at a bar, getting second-hand pepper sprayed isn’t totally shocking. Now, getting pepper sprayed at a tennis match? Now that’s some zesty randomness, there.
[quote="The Sydney Morning-Herald"]Police needed pepper spray to control rowdy fans watching the match between Chile’s 2007 Open runner-up Fernando Gonzales and Greek player Konstantinos Economidis in Margaret Court Arena. ... About two dozen Greek, Cypriot and Serbian fans were involved, according to an AFP photographer at the scene, with early reports of police ejecting four spectators.[/quote]
Going with my existing theory that everything in Australia is manlier, this was merely an attempt to make the genteel game of tennis a bit rougher around the edges. Trouble did strike last year at the Open, too, as Serbian and Croatian fans went at it outside the Open with flagpoles.
Should you get pepper-sprayed at your next tennis match, remember: water helps.
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Tennis, hooligan-style: pepper spray at the Australian Open. Photo credit: AP Photo/Andrew Brownbill. ↵